Curdle your blood

The Woman in Black is a good old-fashioned horror movie: It achieves its effect through dread and tension rather than blood and gore. What modern audiences call a horror movie is really Grand Guignol, a style of theater dating to Paris in the 1890s and characterized by elaborate and bloody special effects. The Woman in Black is a throwback to the movies produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Body Snatcher), where fear comes from a dread of what might happen, not revulsion at what’s actually transpiring on the screen. It’s the kind of fear that’s harder to shake.

Daniel Radcliffe—grown up at last—plays Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor in early 20th century England. Kipps is young (Radcliffe is playing somewhat older than his 22 years), but already a widower with a 4-year-old son and anguished memories of the wife who died in childbirth. His employer, none too gently, warns him that he’d better snap out of his grief if he wants to remain on the payroll; his last chance to save his job is to travel to a bleak, remote coastal village and close out the estate of a recently deceased old recluse, Mrs. Drablow.

Kipps finds the villagers as forbidding as the surroundings, all except local landowner Samuel Daily (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer). But even they are hounded by grief for their dead son (she is quite unhinged by it)—and, in fact, the child mortality rate in this village appears to be unusually high: The movie gets off to an unsettling start by showing three young sisters, in the grip of some trance, leaping to their deaths from the window of their attic playroom.

When Kipps goes to Eel Marsh House, the Drablow mansion—a gloomy old place at the end of a winding road through marshy wetlands, on a low hill that becomes an island at high tide—he looks out a window to see a woman in black standing mute by a grave in the small cemetery behind the house. When he looks again, she is gone. And when he asks about her in the village, the locals become even more hostile and forbidding than before. And more children die.

Anxious to resolve the Drablow estate before his son and his nanny join him in the village for a holiday (which seemed like a better idea back in London), Kipps decides to work through the night at Eel Marsh House, sifting and collating the letters and papers there, even though it means he will be stranded there all night until the tide goes out the next morning. Slowly, by candlelight, he discovers the tortured history of Mrs. Drablow, her husband and her sister, and of a deranged grief that can turn malevolent and reach from beyond the grave. And as he walks the halls of the old dark house, a candle trembling in his hand, things begin to happen.

This isn’t the first time Susan Hill’s 1983 novel has been adapted. There were radio and television versions in the 1980s, plus, most successfully, a stage adaptation that opened in London’s West End in 1989 and is still playing there (it looks likely to become The Mousetrap of the 21st century). Each version, especially Stephen Mallatratt’s play, made major changes in Hill’s original plot, and so does writer Jane Goldman here.

But like the play, Goldman remains true to the novel’s grim and dreadful spirit (no pun intended). The essence of the story is that Arthur Kipps walks into a nightmare that cannot and will not end happily. He seems to know it, and we certainly do, but there’s no turning aside from it, so on he goes, taking us with him. That’s what real horror means, and Goldman preserves that.

Director James Watkins stages the movie with a firm sense of foreboding, slipping up only in an overreliance on the screeching scare chords of Marco Beltrami’s obtrusive score (the underlining is unnecessary; we’d be just as scared without it). As Kipps, Radcliffe has come a long way from the dutiful little boy overwhelmed by the magic of the first Harry Potter movie; he has real command in a role where screen presence is more important than the few words he has to speak.

I saw the West End Woman in Black in 2002, and if you’re ever in London, I recommend it: It’ll curdle your blood and scare the living daylights out of you. But if you can’t make the trip, don’t worry. This movie will get the job done.